With his latest album Ashes & Fire, Ryan Adams seems to have reconnected with much of his audience, although I’m confused as to why he had to reconnect in the first place. I don’t have much in common with those who haven’t liked anything since Heartbreaker. I don’t even really understand that attitude. I mean, […]

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The Horrors perform an extremely capable cover of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust-era “Suffragette City” for Channel 4?s On Track… program. It’s a live, in-studio take, but it sounds amazing. From the mixing to the multi-angle camera-work, this is high-budget, high-quality stuff. This band grows by leaps and bounds with every album, and it’s latest, Skying, […]

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Elvis Costello revived his “Spectacular Spinning Songbook” for a brief tour this past spring. The last time Master Costello had spun the wheel on stage was during his 1986 “Spinning Songbook” tour, wherein the setlist was chosen by the random spin of the wheel with various and sundry hits to choose from the prolific songwriter’s […]

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I’ve been looking forward to this band’s debut full-length all year. This is the first video of its self-titled venture on Dead Oceans. Drenched in reverb. With lost more reverb. Staccato beats. Echoing semi-shouted vocals. It’s a gloriously noisy racket. +1.

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This album has been on constant repeat for the past few weeks thanks to K. Completely infectious, stripped-down, dark synth-pop, replete with hand-claps and sex-bored vocals. “Keep You” is the opening track off the record, and the one I return to the most. This video is unofficial and features footage from 1967’s Anna starring Anna […]

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Duran Duran has released Girl Panic!, the third single from its Mark Ronson-produced and semi-comeback album All You Need Is Now. The video for Girl Panic! lifts a page from George Michael’s “Freedom” but takes the idea much deeper: A cast of well-known supermodels (Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Yasmin Le Bon, Eva Herzigova, and Helena […]

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“Approximately 92% of the 174 songs that made it into the [Billboard] Top 10 in 2009 contained reproductive messages,” says SUNY Albany psychology professor Dawn R. Hobbs in Evolutionary Psychology.

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